@charlie,thank you for initiating this thread. While I would disagree with some of the points you made, I do very much agree that climate change is just one of many factors influencing wildfires in CA and the western US, and I also very much agree when you say it’s problematic to focus on a global issues like climate change if that means we ignore the local and regional issues. Blaming current conditions on climate change allows fingers of blame to be pointed vaguely elsewhere where it’s someone else’s problem, instead of focusing on the local and regional issues that would require pointing those same accusatory fingers at ourselves. Environmental crisis often arise from a failure to anticipate the foreseen, and I think this issue continues to be an example of that, and it is very much a social issue.
As fewer and fewer of us have working relationships with the landscapes that surround us, it seems we have increasingly developed something of an idealized perception of those landscapes, to where landscapes seem to be considered ‘natural’ and should be left to ‘nature’, and humanity is somehow separated from those landscapes. We have seemed to grow more and more resistant to actively managing forested landscapes, especially on public lands. However, there is one social necessity that has to be produced from forested landscapes, for which there is no alternative. That is commercial wood products, of which the US consumes a tremendous amount. And yet, very few discussions of managing forested landscapes focus on this necessity. Usually, discussions on forest management tend to focus on social values, such as managing for wildlife habitat, recreation or some undefined aspiration of ‘restoration’. And often the social value is given more weight than the social necessity, such that commercial timber harvest has become more and more constrained to promote a social value, such as conserving habitat for a given species.
However, constraining the production of a required product like timber volume while making no effort to constrain consumption of that product is absurd, but that’s where we are. If interested, James Howard tracks US timber production and consumption statistics, his latest summary covers the trends from 1965-2017 and is here https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/58506 . As shown in Table 12, in 2005 just before the recession hit the US, we were consuming over a billion board feet of softwood lumber per week. The recession caused this consumption to drop, but since 2009 as our economy has recovered our consumption has increased each year to reach 49.7 billion board feet in 2017. We do not domestically produce all of the timber we consume. In 2017 we imported 16.1 billion board feet of wood products, principally from Canada, and overall the US consumed 50% of the lumber produced in Canada in 2017 (pages 4 and 5). The largest concentration of public timberlands in the US is administered by the US Forest Service, representing about 30% of the nation’s timber growing stock in 2001. Yet timber removed from USFS lands represented just 2% of domestic production in 2001, 5% in 2017. Timber harvest on USFS lands has been constrained to promote social values like wildlife habitat and recreation, while at the same time public lands in the western US, especially lands administered by the USFS, have been hit hard by wildfires. But commercial timber harvest can be designed to not only produce the social necessity of timber, but can also be used to restore forest structure and species composition of our forests, thin dense stands of conifers to restore and promote ecologically important understory vegetation like grasses, forbs and shrubs that have disappeared at landscape scales due to the densification of forests as a result of fire suppression, remove conifers from aspen and other hardwood stands that are in danger of being replaced by conifers, improve habitat conditions for many species, and, in the specific interest in this thread, to reduce the density of forests and reduce fuels to make forests more resilient when fires do happen. Stopping wildfires probably isn’t feasible, but by thinning forests the intensity of fires in terms of the degree of mortality to the trees can be reduced, from high intensity to a more moderate intensity. So instead of wildfires resulting in 10,000s of acres of blackened, fire-killed trees and loss of green forest, mortality could be reduced such that a reasonably intact forest could still be present post-fire, but at lower densities. So the US could produce more of the wood products it consumes, reverse some of the negative ecological trends associated with fire suppression, reduce the effects of wildfires, and reduce the ecological impact of our consumption on other countries, if only we had the resolve to actively manage our forested landscapes. But even if an administration proposed doing so, many who would continue to promote social values over social necessities would litigate to stop it. In the meantime, we watch 100,000s of acres of forest burn every year and blame climate change. Given the trajectory of our population growth in the US, the necessity of conifer forests to produce a tremendous amount of wood products for that ever-growing population, and the huge acreage of those forests lost annually to fire mortality, I do think that in the future people will look back and consider us as the generation who largely squandered this resource. It’s not just climate change.
Thanks for that post. My view on forestry has changed a lot when I moved from California to Vermont. Why? Here in Vermont it often is done well, and is often very much sustainable. In California, at least as of about 10 years ago, what I seen was very much otherwise. Huge corporate entities strip mined the forest and then failed to do any followup management other than bombing the regrowth with herbicide if they didn’t like its species composition. Their spiderweb network of logging roads were not well built or maintained and caused long term watershed damage. Invasive species were spread about.
So… if like Vermont we had people with 100 years of relationship with the land (or better yet Native Americans with 10,000+ years of relationship with the land) ready to truly manage it in the long term? And we had the political will to let them do it? Definitely open to expanding logging in California (i have no idea about Australia). Given the choices we have now - massive corporations and political interests, short sightedness, darn near slow-motion suicide in a lot of cases… i’ll take the anti-logging stance over them any day. And to be blunt, unless there are major changes in who logs and how, I don’t think I personally would ever trust the powers that be to log California again. When a fox kills all your chickens and pees all over the coop, you don’t bring it back in to manage your new chickens.
Don’t get me wrong, I mostly agree with what you are saying too. I just have a very cynical attitude about logging out west, based on a fair bit of experience (though it may be you have more).
In any event one thing I don’t agree about is that logging is the biggest/most important commodity from western US forests. It isn’t logging, nor is it recreation, hunting, ranching or anything else. It is water. The water from those lands supports ~75 million people and much of the country’s food production too (a strong majority of it if you also consider the aquifers in the plains that are fed in part out of the Rockies). It also provides electricity (for better or for worse), fishing, recreation, allows the trees to grow for logging, etc etc etc. The bottom line is even if you have no interest in conservation, watershed management should always be priority number one for the western forests. This, indeed, is something i fear Australia has missed as well, from what I am hearing.
You can ship wood in or if need be find ways to live without it. You can’t live without water and in the western US, the vast majority of that water comes from public lands.
I personally don’t like clearcuts followed by herbicides either. But there really are no right or wrong ways to manage landscapes - how a landscape is managed depends on the fundamental objective of the ownership of those lands. In the USFS, there is a multiple use mission, the NPS has a more ‘natural’ bent on things, private timberland manages timber for economic returns. While i don’t like clearcutting followed by herbicides, i understand it to be consistent w the fundamental objective of those lands. And, i also realize that there are vastly larger clearcuts in British Columbia being harvested to feed our economy here in the US. Even water can be shipped in, such as to S Cal from N Cal via the CA Aqueduct and Delta-Mendota canals… But i agree, water will become a huge issue. i thought the quote provided by @hawksthree from the Matt Frost article hit the nail on the head for me, “Only by changing our entire energy system and social order can we preserve the continuity of our biosphere.” [i haven’t quite figured out how to directly paste quotes in this system…] I do think that’s accurate, and climate change will make that need for change more and more urgent
Well, i’d argue that there is definitely a wrong way to manage the land, and it’s what we’ve been doing in the US West (and Australia?). To be honest I don’t really much agree with either ‘side’ of the ‘liquidate assets’ versus ‘post-colonial “wilderness”’ debate. And for sure, I totally agree that outsourcing forestry is unethical, when we have more control over it here in theory. But in practice, we really don’t. I guess what I am calling for isn’t more or less logging but just as you say at the end of your post rather a total reform of the system which… is really really hard but also is going to happen, either by our own choice or via the laws of physics and the emergent consequences of ecology, climate, and human behavior. What we want I think, and what most people want who are paying attention, is science- based land management that respects all angles of the ecology (including the human ecology), culture, society, water, and climate but without placing ‘nature’ on a pedestal away from ourselves or outsourcing harm via NIMBYism. And that isn’t what we are getting. The current ‘capitalist’ system doesn’t provide that and a quick glance at the USSR tells us that authoritarianism communism doesn’t either! Culural, social, emotional, and one way or another spiritual connection to the land and community are what we need to (re)build. And that’s one reason i lean so heavily on pushing for more rights and recognition of indigenous people including within conservation and land management. Those systems already exist, despite much effort by many people to the contrary, and while we can’t just appropriate them we also need to give them more space to do what ‘we’ (meaning the socio political system that predominates) have failed to do.
It’s true water is shipped some distance but only so far, and it has a lot of various vulnerabilities, there are some very scary earthquake and flood scenarios, not to mention civil unrest, volcanos, drought, etc pertaining to California’s water system (and I imagine Australia’s as well). That’s a whole other issue, too.
Thanks so much for your comments. I mentioned in my earlier post that “Dead, dry vegetation was acting as mulch”. For years the locals have been complaining that they do not get their “normal” rain falls in winter, that it is unusually dry. This means there is no moss, fungi or lichen on the dead vegetation to accelerate decomposition. I also recall “soaks” in places like the heathlands. These were places where you could not see a pool of water but if you walked into the area water would rise up under your feet. I regularly visit these areas and I haven’t seen a soak in years.
A great question, and one that hopefully will be considered more here in Australia (Oz). Similar to California, much of the fire issues can be attributed to changed management, increasing restrictions and control, plus reduced funding for management bodies. I live in Victoria, one of the most fire prone regions in Australia, and work regularly with people responsible for the management of large portions of public land, forests and national parks, plus many farmers.
There have been many observations by these managers and farmers of reduced capacity to burn country over the last 20-30 years. I know one farmer who up until about 15 years ago when restrictions came in would receive a bulk pack of matches each autumn (fall) from the manager of the adjoining public land, to assist him to burn the grassy woodland while burning his native grassland pastures. This was using a technique and timing taught to his grandfather by the local indigenous people of mosaic burning - small spots at cool times of the year.
Public land managers have been seeing reductions in funding, staff and resources to manage many of these forests and parks. One I know who recently retired used to have a permanent crew of 20 field staff to manage weeds, access roads, undertake control burns and more. When he retired last year he had four permanent staff remaining, with summer fire crews coming in spring and leaving in autumn but only available for approved planned burns.
The current system of controlled burns are for fuel reduction, based on planned risk assessment. The burns are done in large scale, with each burn covering between 20-200 ha depending on site and area, which is effectively a hot burn managed with large numbers of staff and resources for each fire.
There are interviews in the area of ‘old timers’ from the local farming community who remember the frequent burning undertaken by the aboriginal people as they passed through the country. Basically this consisted of large numbers of small fires - again the mosaic burn technique, but these happened for most of the year.
There are increasing numbers of farmers and public land managers learning about and keen to implement the mosaic burning techniques from the indigenous teachers, but this is getting no government support. It needs to happen.
As for climate change - this is definitely having a significant impact on the land, the forests and the fires. Our rainfall in southern Oz is declining, or the timing is changing. Our temperatures are increasing, both in maximum and frequency of high. The national Weather Bureau had to add a new colour to the temperature scale for >50C (122F) temperatures in 2013.
In Victoria and many parts of south eastern Oz, farmers have identified that their grain harvest period is now generally 3-4 weeks earlier and also generally half the time period it used to take to maintain quality. Grape growers in North East Victoria are harvesting 2-3 weeks earlier for most varieties, plus their harvest period has halved. One winery had to double their holding tank capacity to manage the harvest with such a short time.
The public land managers are having greater difficulty with their fuel reduction burns. The time windows (spring and autumn) are half the time they were 20 years ago, and even then the autumn burns are often not able to be undertaken due to forests being too dry.
The 2019 Victorian Climate Science Report may be of interest - the page has some great snapshot summary figures.
We are experiencing significantly more days of hotter temperatures than the past - in December 2019 alone we had two periods of over 4 days of temperatures over 40C (104F). These heat waves normally do not appear til late Jan- Feb. Many parts of Vic and NSW have seen the number of days over 40C double in the last 20+ years. Likewise the number of high to extreme fire danger days have also been increasing significantly.
NSW has a large number of towns which have run out of urban water supplies. Victoria will have many soon as well. There are rivers and creeks which have stopped flowing which have never done so before with current records (1840 on) in the Eastern coastal hinterland in NSW.
Our government unfortunately has no intentions to reduce emissions. The predictions for 2030 are worse, even if there is massive global change to reduce emissions. The current climate science predictions are the the current fire situation in Oz ‘are just the precursor’ to what is coming, even if the global temp increase is limited to 1.5deg. I predict large parts of Australia will become uninhabitable, either due to lack of water, high fire risks or even the inability to get insurance.
Many properties burnt this summer will find that they cannot rebuild what they had due to changed planning restrictions. The new fire regulations in Victoria after Black Saturday (2009) means that building costs are 20-40% more than the original build, or designs and materials are no longer permitted.
Sorry about the rant. Gotta go - we have extreme fire risk today, predicted top temperature of 45C with a weather wind change forecast likely to drive any one of 5 fires in our vicinity to our property. Packing ready to evacuate when or if the call comes out. 1000s of people in Vic and NSW have already received the evacuate call. The fire planners have said categorically that even well prepared properties ‘may not be survivable’ with current predictions for today.
I also thought that summed it up nicely - and (proudly demonstrates recently acquired skill) you just highlight the text you want to quote, and the word “quote” pops up, and it seems you click either that word “quote” or the button “Reply”
so my observation in my own garden and nearby reserves, of a failure of dead materials to rot, may well be indicative of chronic drought too…thanks for that
EDIT To be objective, I should point out that my current home (of 20 years) and main restoration area are on the peaks of ridges - unlike previous homes which were on one side of a ridge but quite near the top - and I did not note when this lack of fungi/mosses/rotting started occurring, as at first I attributed it partly to removal of Tradescantia which is an invasive ground cover that holds water, even in detached stems, for years - and creates lovely rotting under its cover.
really hoping you and everyone else out there is safe. I’ve been on the wrong end of a couple of fires in California, though never in immediate peril (two buildings i used to live in while working for the park service have since burned down). There are truly no words… and these fires are bigger.
It is the same thing in the US with decreasing resources for land management, prevention, watershed and wetland restoration, etc. We are finally getting some traction with getting some wetlands restored… where I now live the issue is not fires but floods… increasing severity of precipitation events plus increasing watershed damage means big floods and more water pollution. So we are making some progress with wetlands… but restoring is harder than destroying wetlands, and we still have a long way to go…
Thanks for the comprehensive background @tomc15, I really appreciate it. Sorry I missed this post earlier… I wish you the very best.
This new article is out that lists various endangered species with much of their known range now burnt. Best that inatters get out and try to keep an eye out for survivors once its safe to visit again; near impossible as it may have been to find them even before the fires.
We were lucky yesterday so still here. In regard to the post fire survival of wildlife, things are even worse. It is well known that our two greatest feral pests - foxes and cats- will patrol burnt areas and effectively clean up the surviving wildlife that have no vegetative cover. I can only hope that many foxes and cats were killed by the fires.
The fire the fox and the cat
Glad to hear, I’ve been thinking of you. We have orange-hazed skies here in Auckland this afternoon, and the sky became so dark it looked like it was going to pour with rain, but it was just the smoke apparently, [EDIT according to other reports there was cloud too] cancelling out blue light leaving the orange part of the spectrum.Very high up apparently, and of course nothing to what you are going through but a novel experience for us. Keep taking care.
i’ve seen the orange skies before, in California… not good.
As a Cape Flora scientist in an area where all forests are alien (and invasive) and planted, one can simplify issues drastically. In many areas more and more money is being thrown at fire control, which means no fire. The problem with putting out fires, is that the fuel continues accumulating. As more money is thrown at the problem and teams become more efficient, fires become less frequent and smaller, but all the time the fuel continues growing.
But eventually circumstances (and it will be freak circumstances under which fires will be totally uncontrollable) a fire will escape all the teams, and wreak havoc. How bad and how extreme these fires will be will depend on how efficient the fire-fighting teams have been at stopping fires up to that point (and thus how large the fuel load is and the unburned areas are). Throw in alien invasives (faster fuel growth and more fuel biomass), and hotter climate cycles (and if you want you can throw in human-enhanced climate change on top of this as well), and the situation rapidly escalates.
In South Africa we can add legislation which holds anyone who starts a fire that goes out of control responsible for all and any costs of damage and for controlling the fire, and you end up with a situation where fuel-reduction burns are too scary for any managers to contemplate.
So simply: our catastrophic fires are simply the result of how efficient we are at controlling them! The better we are the greater the disaster that will follow.
I think we can throw Med Europe into this mix as well: they have the silvicultural industry, but also declining grazing by livestock, loss of rural populations to urbanization (less teams to control large wildfires), but more efficient methods at controlling fire (detection and rapid response). Not surprizing that Portugal, Spain, France and Greece are having the same problems.
Our Knysna fires were the result of over 30 years (i.e. twice the natural fire cycle) of fire suppression, rampant alien invasion, and lack of fire-belts, and bad urban planning that has houses within natural vegetation, rather than in fire-defensible refugia, on the back of a normal Berg Wind (= = Santa Anna or Fohn winds). Perhaps global warming has had an impact, but if it had a role, it is possibly that the fire occurred last year, rather than next year.
What I find uncertain about global warming (human-enhanced climate change) is what effect does this have on biomass accumulation? Rainfall is uncertain, so warming may well reduce biomass accumulation. (Ditto water extraction) So warming might well reduce fire severity overall?
The bottom line is: control the fuel loads, and you control the fire severity. Our Mediterranean climates are all fire climax vegetation types (except Chile), and need regular fires to function normally. There is no alternative to fire - we need to manage fire with frequent fire!
How do you mean Charlie? [EDIT- this was meant to read OTHER than…]As an indicator of the unprecedented size of the fires (over 5million Ha, ie 10million acres, have been burnt, according to the news), and the distance smoke travels (about 1000 miles in this case), how is it not good? Psychologically it’s …um…depending on one’s temperament, frightening or just “eerie”, “ominous” or “weird”. It was very dark too, streetlights came on and cars had their lights on. Looked like sunset, 5 hours early.
There have been a few reports of people smelling smoke.
And the Emergency phone number was flooded with calls from concerned people.
This morning in Auckland the haze is just sepia, not orange.
If nothing else, it is an impressive indicator of the global interconnectedness of the environment.
I meant it’s scary. The fire always seems closer than it is, except when it isn’t. And it’s eerie and weird.
Thanks Charlie:) Yes. IT actually came over while I was deeper in the forest than usual, so just seen between trees. At that point it was just weird. As I walked out of the forest at the roadside margin on the ridge, a particularly bright orange part looked like a vivid sunset. As I knew I was facing due East and it was mid-afternoon, this caused me to rather rush up the last 20m to scan the horizon, on doing which the experience went back to somewhere between eerie and slightly ominous.
As I have a life-long fear of fire anyway, I decided the experience - with 1000 miles of water between here and a known current fire area - was helpful overall, as I learned that
a) the orange glow is not (necessarily, anyway) fire glow reflecting off the clouds, but a spectrum shift caused by smoke…they tell me, and I am happy to accept.
b) such a phenomenon can be caused by fire a very great distance away.
People living in fire-prone areas must have learnt something like this to be able to stay and defend their homes, or even not to panic during evacuation. I have the greatest respect for their skills and current situations, and hope my uneducated and inexperienced comments are not irritating or seemingly insensitive, for which I apologize if this is the case.
From what information I’ve gathered, the problem isn’t the fact there is climate change but the fact that people politized it. And in politics, these environmental issues such as the Australian fires, have been exaggerated as climate change. Not only that, everyone has to pick a side, the side of stop climate change and the side of denying climate change. Personally, I’m on the moderate side of the issue. Yes I believe the climate changing but it was going to turn out this way anyhow, I just believed humans accelerated this process and it’s probably irreversible.
But here’s a real life example. This fall I helped my local WMA to plant 2,000 native plants at our marsh so we can take out the junipers next spring because when we planted the junipers 50 years ago, they have since dried up the streams that go into the marsh because they suck up so much water. Some may call it climate change now because the effects of this is happening now but it’s the really the result of a good-nature idea back in the 1970’s.
Really interesting @birdwhisperer. Are the junipers a natural species for that site? If they are, I wonder if there has been a drop in water table or in rainfall for other reasons, so that the water the junipers were presumably designed to filter is no longer there?
Is there stormwater piped or otherwise artificially directed to the site, that prompted an unnatural planting?
This is very relevant to my neighbourhood, thanks for posting.